I’ve just put a “no ads” sticker on my mailslot and it has cut down on 90% of the stuff
I wish they would get rid of all mail except for person to person written letter, checks made out to me, and packages I’ve ordered. Everything else is garbage.
You’d be killing the USPS. They survive because of that garbage.
I would rather pay for more expensive stamps than a time and environmental cost.
Then the USPS is too large and not fit for purpose.
Well, that might be how it’s currently primarily funded, but that doesn’t mean that that’s the way it has to be funded.
See also every argument about ads.
Why yes, taxes should pay essential public services like mail and news.
I’m not convinced they should survive, given all the waste. USPS jobs pay well tho. I’ve made some decent money as a contractor… hauling truckloads of these garbage commercial flyers and nondescript magazines. But in the distribution facilities, I’ve often seen literally shipments of birds, bees, plants, or just glancing down at a pile of mail, might see an obvious love letter. Hopefully not a creep. And all the shipping from Amazon, UPS, Fedex, etc, tends to find its way in a USPS truck.
edit: also, fuck DeJoy. that rat bastard can go back to XPO.
USPS is a magnificent success of the the United States as a country. Holy shit let me shake some of that junk mail out your truckload.
Government services shouldn’t be built to turn a profit.
Government services shouldn’t die based on your bias at your job.
The USPS is one of the few legitimate things we can point to show American Democracy could be great. Fuck all the bullshit mail.
But yeah fuck DeJoy.
i’m not sure which choir to which you preach, but it ain’t over here. I’m not complaining about “government services”, but transporting truckloads of useless paper is lame and wasteful. That is a thing that USPS does. And USPS also gets easily exploited, see the OP meme.
Let me try another tack. USPS has the lowest rate for sending anything compared to UPS and FedEx. Sure they can’t guarantee the exact date of delivery because Mike might need a day for “self care” or “self taking care of shit during business hours”".
You want it now, you just a premium. Grainger got half the shit you want to do a job but at a premium. Same concept.
The cool thing about USPS is they are required to deliver to any and all addresses in America. Your Grandma lives in the middle of nowhere and needs her prescriptions? Usps is probably the only service that will deliver that to her.
In fact medication is a top reason why we NEED the USPS to survive
Checks are also incredibly outdated in most countries.
Sure, but you wouldn’t turn one away if someone legitimately sent you free money.
I’m in my mid thirties in Germany and literally never got or sent a single check.
As someone who rents so much of my mail is from past residents which I have told them do not live here, or local ads (literally several magazines per month) which I can’t opt out of cause it’s EDDM, that I straight up just stopped collecting it. Any small packages that would have gone in the box go on top of the cluster and any letters I received are stuffed into the box and I pick them out if I happen to notice I’m missing something.
Anyone that really needs my attention would call me or email me shrug
My mailbox is near where I leave my garbage, so I only check it once a week. I immediately throw anything that’s clearly an ad directly into the garbage and never look at it.
Same here. Like 90% of my mail is for previous residents. One guy apparently never updated his address so he keeps getting sent checks and I just throw them away. I’ve been living here for 9 months 🤷♂️
I check my mail like once every few weeks. I checked it a few days ago and most of it wasn’t for me. Three out of the 5 things that were for me were from TicketMaster, Rite-Aid, and Choice Healthcare and they were all “Sorry, we’ve been hacked and your personal info was probably leaked.”
When I was renting I had a stamp “Return to sender. Addressee not known at this address”
I never bothered. Not my job if someone doesnt bother setting up mail forwarding and update their accounts when they move.
Yeah I work in a government department which among other things has to handle mail returned to it, and I know we mark addresses unreliable when mail comes back
I guess I just hope the electricity company and local government is as diligent
I’d wait until I had a few before making an effort to post the returns (Australia doesn’t have mail pickup from your home mailbox; we have post boxes at local shops)
I do similar. Cross the name out with a Sharpie and write “MOVED”.
After owning the place for two years now I just throw it out.
Just so you know, throwing mail away that isn’t yours is a federal crime.
I did that for a couple years, and now I still get junk from the previous owner. I’ve been here 10 years…
Then again, now I get invitations to retirement stuff, so I guess that’s cool (I’m nowhere near retirement, but the previous owner was about that age).
Yeah it took some 15 years for the letters for the people who lived in my house before me to stop
Watch out for jury duty summons.
If I’ve never been summoned for jury duty. Does this mean I don’t have any peers?
My address on my license is still my parents house and I haven’t lived there permanently for 18 years. I move around a lot (hopefully I can finally stop that this year) so I wasn’t going to get a new driver’s license every year or two. Whenever I get a summons, I just reply with one of the exclusions (“I live more than 40 miles away”, “I don’t live in the state anymore”, etc…). I’ve never had to go 😂
In my state, you have to update your address on the license (but you dont need to be issued a new card, just update the file)
I’ve lived in two other states so far other than the one on my license, but I also haven’t driven in those states in those times (other than something like ZipCar or renting a car) that I’ve lived there. The time I did live in the same state, I lived at least 1.5 hours from that address/county so I could just claim “I’m too far away”.
Mine made a clerical issue when I updated my address and decided there were two of me once. Only found out because both of me got jury duty. That was a fun one.
Just finished my jury duty and it was a wild ride
Other jurors shocked me with how antaganostic they were to the plaintiff for asking for compensation and punishment for a nursing home’s negligence. We ended up awarding money for clear negligence- specifically for injuries (physical and financial) and pain, but it was a struggle to find agreement from them for clear facts that neither side disputed (and verbally acknowledged this nondispute). When it came time to answer if the doctor was negligent in not consulting a wound physician, they didnt agree because the nursing home policy said “do it if wound doesnt improve in 2-4 weeks”. Wound got worse over the 5-6 weeks they waited and by the time they did, she was so bad from not participating in therapy (due to being laid on the wound constantly and the ensuing pain) that she had had to be put on hospice and died from a lack of dialysis.
Because they didnt find the violation of her rights (violations were agreed to) to be reckless or willful (such as by understaffing or poor care), we could not award additional damages to punish the nursing home
I take solace in the fact that it gave the family closure for a 6 year lawsuit
That second part is surprising to me. “Facility policy” and/or signed paperwork don’t allow a provider to be negligent to someone under their care.
Hell, it wouldn’t even protect individual nurses’ licenses. Any licensed individual who provides care is responsible for following the law, even if “policy” contradicts it.
Thats what I was trying to argue but the other jurors were more concerned with not having to come back on Monday and a “that’s what it says” with no critical thinking. Esp when the plaintiff expert witnesses (an excellent nurse who has a practice investigating nursing homes for compliance with the federal regulations and an excellent doctor who worked for CMS writing the very regulations) outlined what care the law requires
What’s crazier is that I get 5lbs of junk mail regularly, but if I go to the post office and try to mail a 1 lb envelope it’s like $40
Economies of scale…s
@The_Picard_Maneuver Here in the UK, sure we get Spam mail but there’s red labels and stuff for really important mail from the government and things and most of the time it’s just telling you to pay for a TV licence that you wouldn’t use as you don’t pay for live TV and just watch YouTube.
If there was a way to highlight official government mail, spam mailers would use it to fool people into thinking it’s something important. I get tons of spam that looks like something official.
We have specially coloured envelopes for government mail in the Netherlands, I’ve never gotten any spam trying to imitate them (and we do accept spam mail, we could also put a sticker on the mailbox to reject it, but my partner likes them).
@Semi_Hemi_Demigod They have a few things such as a return address to a government building on the envelope along with the envelope actually being a certain type that I haven’t seen with any other mail.
Sorry, I meant that if such a policy were implemented in the USA it would be abused by spammers. There would be a Supreme Court case where the spammers win because they used a slightly different color and it would suck.
We’re a young democracy and not very good at it.
It already is. Spammers use the tear-off style envelopes used for your checks or tax returns and many other ‘secure’ mail. The Republican party near me sent out mailers that looked like traffic bills saying how you may have to turn in your firearms (they were pretending it was from the local Democratic party). It’s already fucked here.
Similar in Germany. The “we are done playing, ignore this and go to jail” mail will be sent in a special yellow envelope most of the time.
You really need a license to watch TV? I always thought that was a joke.
@bizzle A TV licence is meant to pay for our public TV services (that you get through an Arial ‘for free’) You pay a subscription to pay for things such as the BBC and ITV both TV and Radio.
It is pretty much a joke at this point as they often try and come around and claim the lamest of reasons why you still need to pay for a TV Licence.
- “You have a TV”
- “It could still access the BBC”
- “Your phone could connect to the BBC”It is just a bullshit way of a company trying to take money.
Or their incredibly shitty way of collecting your taxes that should just be paid yearly to support BBC. Fuck I’m American and I’d pay taxes for BBC.
@MutilationWave why should I pay for something I don’t like support or use
Let me go back to front in the queue. Why should you not use it and pay for it?
Community outreach. People living near or far from you would benefit from getting BBC news at their houses. Imagine a Ukrainian family took refuge in your country but they still just had a government tent or shack. But even if they’re on the border of nowhere they can get the BBC on satellite.
I’m a motherfucking American and the first thing I check in the morning is BBC
@MutilationWave Well I don’t often enough the BBC is spreading misinformation & hatred about people like me so i’m not interested.
Same as hospitals. The BBC, done well, is a great public asset. It is one of the most effective engines of British soft power. It has to be a reliable source of information. It innovates television by not prioritising a profit motive.
Laugh it up. Yes that’s all gone to shit now, but what we’ve got is still better than not having it (source: have lived long term in countries without state broadcasting), and hopefully it can excel at its core functions one day. Again: that’s what we hope for with our other public services that were wrecked by the Tories.
For me it’s 99 spam things and one Manila folder. It’s always the VA noticing I exist again and deciding I haven’t been fucked with enough recently.
So you’re saying good advertisements should be a single sheet of typewritten thin cheap paper in a brown envelope?
(to be fair, some shitty “advertisers” [self-signed cert] already do that, to the point of impersonating the courts!)
In the US you just shoot the people that try to put ads in your mailbox. Not a lawyer tho so idk. shrug
This post was written by a dog with a gun.
LPT: probably shouldn’t do this
Thanks for the warning, i almost shot the mailman.
LPT: If you aren’t caught it isn’t a crime
ILPT: probably should do this
How does this nonsense comment even have upvotes?
Yeah idk man, my brain just produces things and sometimes they just happen to turn into typed text.
Nonsense is a fun reprieve when the topic is fuggen bills/junk mail?
Hate is for bitches. You’re not a bitch, right?
Jokes are funny
Weird, unrelated comment, but yeah—jokes are indeed funny.
🤣
Come to think of it, that’s pretty much email, too.
75% automated notifications or stuff that isn’t quite spam but you don’t care about
23% spam
2% stuff that you better not miss
As a postal worker I have an awesome tip:
Take all your mail, then rifle through it looking at the postage. Make a pile for Standard, a pile for First Class, and put everything else in a third pile (non-profit etc). Look through the pile of Standard. It’s literally all garbage. Look through the pile of first class, them’s the bills. Look through the non-profit pile and if you’re lucky you got return address labels from the Humane Society. If you didn’t get return address labels and you need return address labels, make a small donation to the ASCPA and give it a month
If I lived in the US I’d have liked to vote to make it illegal to deliver promotional / junk / “Standard” mail to mailboxes with a standardized and large “NO ADS” label in specified spots on the front and sides, with a small fine for the post worker and very large fines for the companies in the ads.
I would not be happy to sit and sort through piles of junk for the rest of my life, with it without knowing that “Standard” is all junk.
Man I’ve been giving the ASPCA $20 a month for years and not a single address label…
Try Heifer International
What’s an address label? (I’m not american)
Label you put in the corner of your outgoing mail that has your name and address preprinted on it so you don’t have to write it.
Well you see there’s your problem, you were supposed to be donating to the ASCPA
Kind of feel about that about software updates.
I used to have a personal project site that ran Drupal. I don’t know how things are now, but back then, every module could be updated automatically, except for the Drupal Core itself which had to be updated manually.
The one time I went “oh shit, a core update - nah, I can leave it after the weekend”, the site got hosed by malware.
(It’s a Jekyll site now. Drupal was a bit of overkill for it anyways.)
USPS says you can write “Refused” on your mail to refuse it. I’ve heard that can possibly stop them from sending you more.
If you wanted to actually opt-out from the largest mail advertising organization’s lists though, you have to pay them. Good 'ol capitalism.
You can completely opt out of the credit card spam ones with a simple sign up on a federal website, but I forget the exact one and am too lazy to hunt it down. Only lasts 5 years though
Or you can do a full mail in thing for the lifetime one, might do that since I just hit my 5 year and started getting spam again
The site is OptOutPrescreen, by the way!
It’s not a federal website, it’s a “joint venture among Equifax Information Services, LLC, Experian Information Solutions, Inc., Innovis Data Solutions, Inc., and TransUnion, LLC (collectively the “Consumer Credit Reporting Companies”).”
So it’s not technically government-enforced in any way, but the credit bureaus just kind of decide to honor it to be… nice?
I know nothing about this but top of my head it sounds like one of those self-policing things companies do to keep from being regulated. So they’ll honor it if you jump their hoops, but so few people even know the hoops are there it works out for said company to honor the few that do, and they will, to keep that regulation from ever appearing.
Yeah, those are the details!
It does actually work, and I assume it’s entirely because of what the other reply said
Capitalism is shit, hopefully more people can learn about this because it IS nice, even more hopefully the law gets changed to end it
Only works on first and second class mail, and just be unopened. I’ve been doing this for years and I get maybe 1 credit card offer a month. It’s now at the point where most of my mail is actually stuff I want/need and only get mail like twice a week.
You have to write it in red and diagonally as everyone knows.
I hate junk mail but sadly all those wasted resources are the only thing keeping the post office afloat.
